From Elsewhere: The NHS, the mass killer that nobody wants to talk about.

Stafford Hospital where one death is a tragedy but 1200 deaths are but a mere statistic.

The worship of the National Health Service, encouraged by politicians and trade unions, has created an organisation that is sclerotic, beauracratic, run for the benefit of its staff, and which cannot give the required standard of care to those who require it. It also appears to have become completely unaccountable as well, and senior staff do not carry the can when things go wrong on their watch. Being an NHS senior manager is a win-win situation. For them it is a case of getting things right gets the manager praised, but getting things wrong seems to have no consequences. A senior NHS manager can travel from screw up to screw up and nobody will ask them to account for the slew of dead bodies or mismanaged institutions left in their wake.

Many who have been patients or the relatives of patients treated by the NHS would recognise and agree that the NHS is a terrible hotchpotch of inflexible services, waste, incompetence, patchy care quality and sometimes instances of actual cruelty. This ‘envy of the world’ not only doesn’t function effectively as a healthcare system, but also has an appalling level of ‘excess deaths’ and mistreated patients. British people are slowly beginning to see through the lie that the NHS provides better healthcare than other systems. The extra and unncessary deaths of up to 1200 people at Stafford Hospital Trust and further deaths and blunders in other hospitals is showing just how bad things really are. It seems to be that it is not so much which political party in whose hands the NHS is safe in, but are we, as patients safe in the hands of the NHS?

There is an excellent piece in The Commentator blog on the subject of the NHS by Alex Wickham. Mr Wickham cuts through the waffle about the NHS and said that the worship of the NHS is ‘costing lives’.

Mr Wickham said:

“The truth is that Britain has succumbed to a perverse, possibly irreversible, culture when it comes to the NHS. For six decades our children have been brought up believing they are the lucky ones; just imagine what it would be like to live in one of those other countries where they aren’t so fortunate. Have the insubordination to suggest reform and you are silenced immediately. Do any more than that and you might have a family grave desecrated or be sent off for a secret mental health assessment. What next, reeducation camps and public struggle sessions? “

An excellent article on a subject for which there is a dire need for open, public debate.